


Safe

by jujubiest



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Headcanon, Lincoln is gay, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 05:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6182404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lincoln has spent most of his life feeling alone, and terrified. He hides the largest parts of himself away from everyone, even Michael. There's only one person who has ever made him feel safe enough to be completely honest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a headcanon and I just couldn't let it go until I wrote a ficlet about it, so. Here it is. Also fuck Lincoln because I SWORE I would not get sucked into writing Prison Break fanfiction and yet this little shit pulled me in anyway.

When he’s fifteen, his mother dies, and from that moment on Lincoln decides that he’s the adult, because those are his choices: adult, or orphan. He can’t stomach being an orphan.

The trouble is, he doesn’t know how to be an adult yet, either.

He manages to grab guardianship of Michael and hold onto it, at least for a short while. He quits school, which he sees as an absolute waste of his time. He does what he has to do to keep Michael fed and clothed and more or less healthy. Most of that involves getting himself into trouble, but as long as Michael never has feel this desperate and hopeless and lost, Lincoln tells himself it’s more than worth it.

 

(He’s fourteen. His mother is a vibrant presence in his daily life, and his biggest worries are homework and keeping Michael out of his room.

Lincoln’s best friend is a skinny boy named Andrew with big, sad brown eyes made to seem even bigger by the thick, round lenses of his glasses. He has a mouth full of braces and too-long, ill-kempt hair that is perpetually falling into his eyes, and he gets picked on a lot, except when Linc is around. Nobody picks on him then.

He comes over to study every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Linc is not the best student, but he’s far from stupid, and his good subjects just happen to be Andrew’s bad subjects, and vice versa. Linc locks them into his room—locks his geek little brother out, is more like it—and cracks open his math book, ready for someone to finally explain why his lessons have suddenly turned into alphabet soup. He used to _like_ math.

Andrew lays claim to the spot on the bed furthest up and closest to the wall, cushioning his back with one of Linc’s pillows. It’s _his_ corner. He patiently explains algebra to Linc, who listens without understanding, all his attention on the way Andrew’s hair has fallen over his eyes yet again.

Linc reaches out without thinking and pushes it back behind his ear. Andrew freezes and looks up at him, brown eyes wide and surprised, and a little afraid. It’s the last that makes Linc’s careless smile draw in on itself, prompts him to pull his hand back as though he’s been burned. There’s an apology pressing against the inside of his closed mouth, but it never makes it out because Andrew leans forward and kisses him.

After that first kiss, it happens every time he comes over to study. Just quick kisses stolen between math problems, and half-hidden smiles that leave Lincoln’s cheeks and ears burning, his lips tingling. They never talk about it with each other, and Lincoln doesn’t mention it to anyone else, either. Not because he’s ashamed or afraid, it’s just…it’s theirs. And it’s only kissing. There’s nothing to tell and anyway, it’s nobody else’s business.

When he drops out of school a year later, Andrew shows up on his doorstep looking hurt and angry. Lincoln knows, just looking at him he knows, sees the disappointment and the worry-fear-bitterness in those dark eyes. He hasn’t been himself lately, not since his mom died. He hasn’t let himself think about it, but of course if anyone noticed, it would be Andrew.

Andrew, who’s looking at him like he’s already missing him, like he’s _planning_ on missing him, and that realization—that this is where they part ways—shoots through Lincoln like a zap from a Taser—something he’s already all too familiar with for someone his age.

They don’t make any promises. There’s no good-bye kiss. Lincoln tells Andrew to get lost, and he does, his eyes swimming with hurt and confusion that Linc wants—but can’t afford—to take away. There’s a part he has to play now, a person he has to be all the time, if he’s going to keep Michael. And he has to keep Michael. They’re all each other has.

And that part doesn’t include stolen kisses from boys with pretty eyes, so Lincoln folds that memory away, locks it up, and tosses the key.

But he can’t ignore it, not completely, because Andrew’s not the only boy in the world with pretty eyes and a shy smile, messy hair, bitten lips that Lincoln wants to kiss. He’s starting to realize that he has a type, and that it doesn’t include anyone who’s a girl.

He tells no one, this time out of a very real fear. He’s learned, in the short time since his mother’s death, to think of those secret moments with a burning shame.)

 

He and Michael move in with Veronica’s family, a last-ditch attempt to keep them together and keep Linc in school and out of trouble. Vee is tall for her age, freckle-faced and scrappy, dark hair always tied up off her neck in a messy knot. She looks at him with bright blue eyes that seem sharp and kind at the same time, and he finds himself telling her things he never talks about with anyone else. The pain of missing his mother. The anger at her, for leaving them alone in the world. The constant, knife-like terror at the thought that someone might come and take Michael away from him any given day, and Lincoln would never see him again.

 

(He only holds one thing back from Vee, because it seems too big and too dangerous a secret to tell. But she guesses anyway, in a moment that has Lincoln seizing up with fear and dread like a hunted animal running into the path of oncoming headlights.

“Shhh,” she tells him. “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone.”

She never does.

She pushes, sometimes, in that way that’s both firm and gentle. Tries to encourage him to open up about it on his own. He turns to stone, gray-faced and silent, and after the first couple of tries, she gives up.

Lincoln is glad, because he’s a knot of confusion every time she brings it up. He’s thought the word to himself, over and over, once for every hole in the tiles of the ceiling in his bedroom until he falls asleep with it looping through his brain. He’s tried to apply it to himself, and he has to admit…it fits. It feels right. What it stands for, what it means…that feels true.

Except for Veronica.

Lincoln’s pretty sure he’s in love with her, and he doesn’t know what to make of that because he’s…he can’t be in love with her, can he? This and the other thing…they can’t both be true.

Still, he tells her, with shaking hands, and she wraps him up in her arms, holds him, says she loves him too. And that maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe love and sex don’t always have to go together.

She makes it sound so simple, and Lincoln wants to believe it can be. He throws himself into loving her, adores her with his every waking moment. And it’s easy to do. She makes him feel safe, safe like nothing has felt in his life since he woke up one morning and had to choose adult over orphan.

Even after they stop living with the Donovans, even when Linc is in and out of trouble, put away for months at a time in juvenile detention…even then, Vee is a constant. She’s there waiting the moment he gets out, smile a little fallen, eyes a little sad…but they brighten when they meet his, and he promises himself he’s going to do better next time, for her, and for Michael, too.)

 

They lie curled up in bed together sometimes, separated only by space and sheets, and Linc strokes her hair and counts her freckles and wonders at the hunger that stirs in him, not for sex, but just…something. To be closer, to be a part of her somehow, to give her something she might want but would never ask for.

One night he presses a careful kiss to her lips and feels them part with surprise, takes the opportunity to slip his tongue inside, feels rather than hears the intake of her breath, the way it catches. When she pulls away from him her eyes are full of questions, uncertain, accusing. But whatever she reads in his face must settle her fears, because when he reaches out to her she takes his hand, lets herself be drawn in, doesn’t push him away when his lips seek hers out again.

Lincoln makes love to her like a scientist: testing, observing, repeating each touch and movement that gets him a positive response. It’s not smooth, but it works. By the time he’s done she’s curled into his chest, face pressed to his bare skin, quivering all over and begging him to push her just that little bit further, get her over that edge.

He does what she asks and she comes apart in his arms, breath warm and teeth sharp against his shoulder as she shivers her way through her release, clinging to him. When she stills he kisses her forehead, her cheeks, her eyelids. Presses kisses to her tangled hair and holds her to him as her breathing slows down and she melts against him, eyes falling closed.

He falls asleep soon after, satisfied, safe.

 

(That feeling fades from his life when she does, disappearing into a haze of bad decisions, drugs, and always one more responsibility than he knows how to fulfill, too much, too young. He’s the one who pulls away, not her. Not Vee. She wouldn’t abandon him, no matter how many times he broke her heart, and that’s why he made himself do the walking for them both. He couldn’t stand to look at her one more time and know he’d failed her.)

 

Sitting behind a wall of shatterproof glass, dressed in prison blues, staring death row in the face. Those are not the conditions of safety. No one has any right to feel safe in that position. But when Veronica sits down in front of him and tells him they may have a fighting chance, he believes her against his own better judgment. He aches to reach out and touch her, just once. To carry that feeling of safety back to his cell on his skin.

He falls asleep that night knowing Veronica is out in the world fighting for him, looking for a way, and that fills him up with something altogether different from the sharp, jagged affection he felt when Michael told him about his plan.

For the first time, he thinks he might not die in that place.

 

(A few weeks later they’re out, they’re free. Michael did it, he pulled it off, and all he wants is for Veronica to come home, to step back from this fight and these people that scare Lincoln more than dying had, because they will erase everyone he loves from existence if given the chance, just to punish him for running.

There’s a phone call, Veronica’s voice on the line and Lincoln just wants to run to her, find her, see her face again. She sounds so happy, so hopeful. She thinks she’s saved him, really saved him.

But her happiness is short-lived, the hope false. There’s no one there to save her, when she needs it most. There’s nothing Lincoln can do but listen to her last moments with horror and despair.

A sharp intake of breath. Her voice sounds so small, disbelieving.

A gunshot, deafening. Then ringing silence.

Lincoln calls her name, knowing she won’t answer. There’s a gaping hole in his chest and it’s filling up with the pain of that silence, with the untenable meaning of it.

Veronica is gone. She’s not coming back. And Lincoln knows he will never feel safe again.)


End file.
